Original Sin

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Original Sin
#mood today
The convergence
Mouth on bulge through the fabric. You agree. Reblog
Aziraphale hand studies + Who We Are + crying
(lyrics from Who We Are by Hozier)
Part two of this series found here. More to come!
Ko-Fi
Aziraphale hand studies + Who We Are + crying
(lyrics from Who We Are by Hozier)
Part two of this series found here. More to come!
Ko-Fi
Where the show creators have really threaded the needle, I think—for me, for me, I know we are all still processing and opinions vary wildly—is in showing Aziraphale and Crowley grow close again. Especially given how little time there was for it in a film-length finale after the devastation of S2.
We start with their first bitter exchange, Aziraphale’s hurt pride leading him to say,
“Look, I know you’re upset with me.” “Yep.” “But I’m willing to overlook that.” (Oh come ON, angel. Come ON.) … “Close the door on your way out.” “But... you don’t have a door.” (Priceless.)
Then, though. Then. Crowley goes after Aziraphale almost immediately. And Aziraphale doesn’t expect it. Doesn’t know, at first, that it was Crowley who’d opened the door to the bookshop. Aziraphale’s “Crowley!” once he realizes it is an exhale—startled, gentle—and it absolutely murders me, the way he says Crowley’s name.
Their confessions start before that, of course—those rough, pained, raw confessions. Confessing their loss to others—sometimes, at the most inopportune times.
“I’ve lost worse things than that.”
“Heartbroken. World broken. What’s the point of anything?”
Muriel asking Aziraphale, “Why don’t you ask your… friend friend to help?” and Aziraphale hurrying to say that no, no, it’s out of the question—with that whole journey his face goes through as Muriel persists, “He might like to see you, anyway. Last time I saw him, he wasn’t in the best way, to be honest.” Then, Aziraphale finally turns to her, focused so completely on what he hears. “He seemed a bit… lost,” she goes on—and in a heartbeat, before she’s even gone out of the room, Aziraphale is miracling himself to Earth.
Mrs. Sandwich, meeting Aziraphale as he witnesses the decay of Whickber street, tells him exactly what she thinks. “You never cared for him. Or Whickber street,” she says, and Aziraphale’s face fills with pain. “I… I love—Whickber street!” he protests: not saying it, never saying it, and yet we hear the unspoken. Oh, angel.
Back to the bookshop, then, where Crowley followed him.
We go immediately from Aziraphale saying, “I needed Muriel. I needed someone to work with me in Heaven who was… nice.” “Ah.” to Crowley’s “You weren’t here. I wasn’t going to lose this place as well.” (Please, I beg of you. Somebody make a gif of the way Crowley says it, of the way he swallows at the end of it, turns his head.)
And then Crowley is forced to confess how he lost his Bentley, to protect the bookshop from another fire. Then he proudly refuses help in getting it back. Is rescued, and oh, Aziraphale as a rescuer is a joy to watch. “I’m a retired bookseller!” he announces with the same kind of gravity as that with which Evelyn, in The Mummy, proclaims that she’s a librarian. (Fully dying, by the way, at the way Aziraphale baits Brian Cameron to play. Second best. After me.)
There’s bickering all the while, of course there is, some of it desperately funny for us as the audience. The whole rescue! The way Aziraphale strides in (to dramatic music) and announces himself, only for Crowley to groan!
“I’ve come to get my friend back. And our c—his car.” (djkdfjkdf Aziraphale, you’re perfect.) “You’re a friend of his?” Brian Cameron says in disbelief. “No, he’s not.” “I rather think I am. I’m rescuing you. And liberating our Bentley!” (Perfect.)
Crowley hovering over Aziraphale’s shoulder for the whole competitive crossword solving business and his little smirk when Aziraphale brightly says, “Finished!”
How proud is he of his angel, do you think?
Oh, he's so mad, still. And so, so proud.
And Aziraphale is starting to hear Crowley, too. Even in those very first scenes in the bookshop. When Crowley says, “You weren’t here. I wasn’t going to lose this place as well,” Aziraphale whips around, and for a moment he is lost for words. “Oh,” is all he can say at first—before he goes on, hesitant and slow. “Obviously not. I… I suppose I should say thank you.”
Years. Literal years that Crowley has been taking care of his bookshop. Has been dusting it, protecting it, keeping away vandals and rats. (Has he been dusting it by hand, this last while after his miracles were cut off? Aziraphale doesn’t know this yet, but if he knew.)
All these years, Crowley waited, and Crowley cared.
This, I think, is when Aziraphale’s own anger starts to give way. Because the next thing he says—so soon after he assured Crowley that he would be waiting for an apology from him for a very long time—the next thing he says is “Do you… Do you want an apology from me?”—and it’s not quite soft yet, but it’s already most of the way there.
Right, so they get Crowley’s car back.
(Love the way Aziraphale announces to Brian: “I’ll take the car… and my friend.” I just bet that some part of Crowley, angry and hurt though he is, is warmed by this. By Aziraphale rescuing him, at just the right time. By Aziraphale repeating, over and over: my friend. my friend.)
And their car ride is key, I think, to them starting to understand each other. Nothing like a bit of forced proximity to begin untangling things.
There is still plenty of hurt on both sides. They bicker. They exchange barbs and pointed comments.
“Right, let’s get it over with. So, where is Jesus?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know?” “Well, no. Otherwise, I wouldn’t need to find him! And I wouldn’t need y—“ “Wouldn’t need me. Nice. Gotcha.”
Aziraphale isn’t done speaking when Crowley interrupts him, but is anything he might’ve said better than anything else? “Wouldn’t need you to drive me goodness knows where?” “Wouldn’t need you to help me find him?” “Wouldn’t need you?”
Crowley has made his point, though. They go on.
(To the audience, their bickering is, as always, a delight. Even here. Even now. “What are we going to do? Ring a bell? Leave out snacks? Hang signs on lamp posts saying ‘Missing Messiah, can offer Small Reward?’”)
I do love Aziraphale trying to break the awkwardness by finding music that Crowley might like, in vain, and Crowley hitting right back. “Stop flustering me, I can’t—I can’t think straight!” Aziraphale wails. (Oh, I bet, angel. I just bet.)
Then, though, then they get to the real thing. The hurt. The “you can’t change anything, it’s all rigged, the entire universe.” The “you leave me to go back to sort out Heaven, and you’ve made it into more of a mess than it was already.” The “you could have avoided all this, I asked you to come with me.”
And Aziraphale finally, finally responds with something he'd never said this plainly before. “How could we have been happy, knowing that we were leaving all these people to goodness knows what awfulness? … I just wanted to save everything so that everyone could have a chance, including us!”
This is key. This is where Crowley starts hearing him, I think. Yes, things have gotten desperately bad, but also Aziraphale is finally admitting it openly: an ‘us’. He’d wanted an ‘us’, too, and he’d wanted everyone to have a chance. And he understands how important it is to Crowley for everyone else to have a chance, too—even if Crowley himself has given up on it, has resigned himself to the inevitable fate of the world.
Crowley starts hearing him.
And then, of course, proceeds to follow Aziraphale directly into Heaven.
I repeat: Crowley follows Aziraphale directly into Heaven. “Oh, no, no, I’m coming with you,” he says this time around when Aziraphale announces he’s going to return there himself.
“To Heaven? You most certainly are not!”
“You clearly can’t do this on your own, come on.” (The chucking of the ice-creams? Priceless.)
And the thing is, the thing is. Crowley says ‘you cannot do this on your own,’ because he would always say that. That’s what he does; that’s his armour. That’s him hiding vulnerability. And what he’s doing right now is very vulnerable: he is following Aziraphale upstairs, the one thing he said he would not do; going with him to the one place where he had said he would not go. What he is not saying, but what’s coming through so loudly in what he does is angel, I hear you. This time, I hear you, and this time, it’s going to be both of us, we are going to do this together. Despite the hopelessness, I am going to try. I’m with you, angel, I’m not going to leave you there alone.
Aziraphale said ‘this is for us’, and Crowley heard him.
(I wish we had more time. Of course I wish we had more time. To see a few more moments between them. It had to be Aziraphale, miracling Crowley an outfit for Heaven. Those skin-tight trousers, dear Someone. What else could we have seen, had we been able to follow their elevator ride? Have heard?)
And in Heaven, they’re both of them perfect. They could complete each other’s sentences. “Complaint duly noted and registered,” Aziraphale says to Saraquel’s objections. (A&C’s mirrored expressions in that moment kill me.)
“Will it make a difference?” Saraquel says, and Crowley answers in Aziraphale’s stead (this is what he thinks about all kinds of making a difference): “Oh, no.”
Aziraphale and Crowley start validating each other. “That’s brilliant,” Aziraphale says to Crowley’s suggestion that reality is being edited. Crowley, after arguing that Aziraphale is certainly NOT a master of disguise, has to concede “Oh, that’s actually rather good”—and coming from him, that is High Praise.
(He is right, too. Archduke Slorch the Vile, Master of the Secret Torments? Perfect.)
GOOD OMENS | 2019 - 2026
Stefan Bleekrode
Fanfiction is insane. You can write porn so good you make friends.
no matter how normalised it gets I will die on the hill that it is rude to record strangers in public without their consent
I think the message of Howl’s Moving Castle is that in order to maintain a successful relationship with some kind of fucked up wizard, you must find it in yourself to also be some kind of fucked up wizard.
See, I don’t think that’s the case. Certainly, Sophie’s magic is often more practical than Howl’s, but if you think that the practicality of one’s magic is a reasonable measure of how good a fucked up wizard is at being a fucked up wizard, you don’t understand fucked up wizards.
By some metrics, Sophie is a more fucked up wizard - Howl would never mess something up by accident! But here’s the thing, they complement each-other. Sophie is practically-oriented, but she’s not always competent to do what she intends, nor does she know what she’s doing. Howl always knows what he’s doing and why, and it’s usually useless bullshit for terrible reasons. Howl knows what he is intimately. He knows his strengths and his weaknesses and he knows that he’s got a spine like wet, single ply tissue paper. Sophie complements this by doing whatever it is she sets her mind to, but having exactly zero capacity for self-reflection (or if she does it’s through a funhouse mirror)
Your honor, they’re both a better fucked up wizard than the other, just how they’re supposed to be.
[ID: Image one is a tag that reads: “#you must become a BETTER fucked up wizard than your wet peacock of a fucked up wizard boyfriend.” The word in caps is “better”.
Image two is a reply by @/downtroddendeity that reads: “Howl ripped out his own heart and set it on fire and then immediately went “wait fuck that was a bad idea” and spent the next few years completely failing to do anything to fix it, and Sophie laid an unspeakably powerful, unbreakable curse on herself by ACCIDENT. They’re perfect for each other.”
Image three is a tag that reads: “y’all are perfect for each other. please never get anyone else involved.” End ID]
people love the idea of the mean girl nurse pipeline because it problematises medical abuse as a personal perversion rather than understanding it as a product of broadly held ableist values and its like, if this was only about ontologically evil teenage girls choosing to enter a profession because of their unique sadism then you really wouldnt expect to see the exact same forms of abuse pervading all arrangements of paid, unpaid, formal, ad hoc, and familial caretaking as well -- its more comforting to believe the nurse was just a preexisting bad person than that most of the world broadly hates disabled people and will abuse, neglect, and gaslight them if given power over their care
there should be a rule u can’t get stressed for 30 minutes after u wake up. i just woke up. spawn invincibility please.
Every time someone comments on my old fic, i feel like I'm an old actor getting paid residuals. Appreciate you, old-fic-commenters. Key source of emotional income, tbh.